The Fortune Tellers

 

 The Fortune Teller series was initially inspired by a painting by Carravagio called the Fortune Teller (1594). The scene depicts a young boy having his palm read by a gypsy girl. They both look into one another’s eyes, but unbeknown to the boy, the gypsy girl is removing a ring from his finger. Fortune telling, a form of divination, was and still is practiced as a way to predict information about a persons past, present and future life. I used to play a game as a child called the fortune teller which was created similar to the structure of an origami object.

The game was created from a folded square piece of paper. The structure used numbers and colours from which the person whose fortunes were being read could chose from. The concept for my first collection of Fortune Tellers involved playing with this 3 dimensional structure but using photographs from vintage Hollywood portraiture. The folding and restructuring of the photograph  allowing a distortion of the faces of the actors, charging the image to act in an alternative way.